Options to Limit Feedback in A Taste for the King

In my previous post I wrote about considering augmenting the Say One Thing rule with an additional restriction. I am looking at possibly reducing the number of players who can give feedback about the current player’s hand to 2-3 players in games with 5 or more players.

Option 1

Only the players either side of the current player can say something about the hand. This would be the simplest to implement but it would result in a lot of downtime for players as the round moves around the table. If all rules are being played properly a player would probably still want to pay attention to learn information about how others are bluffing but they wouldn’t be experiencing the full fun of the game every turn and that should be avoided if at all possible.

Option 2

To counteract this I had the idea to have the players who can give feedback move around with each hand. The first hand would have the player to the left of the current player say something, followed by the player to the right of the current player (observer 2). This would be followed up by the two players to the right of observer 2 for the second hand and finally, if the player should choose to continue to their third and final hand, the players to the right say something.

There are a couple of problems with this. In games with less than 8 players, some players may get multiple goes at giving feedback about a hand. This isn’t necessarily a problem for two reasons. The first is that if I chose option 1, only 2-3 players would give feedback each turn, precluding the others from giving feedback so it’s not that different here. The second reason is that players who aren’t giving feedback could still benefit from the pros and cons of being given discarded cards, they just wouldn’t have direct influence on that decision. One solution to this would be to limit each player to giving feedback once.

The second issue is that if I limit players to giving feedback just once per turn, the current player may not get the same level of feedback on their last hand as they do on the first and second. Having played the game with 2 players and determined that a player needs a minimum of 2 pieces of feedback per hand to make a good decision, this isn’t necessarily a problem but it does feel unbalanced.

The final potential issue is that it could be hard to keep track of the current feedback giver if the first hand is split across the current player and this leads me to option 3.

Option 3

This version is much like option 2, however instead of splitting the first turn across the current player, feedback starts with the player to their right. This would certainly be easier to keep track of but it feels rather un-thematic and somehow a little less game-like.

Of course all of this may be moot once the Say One Thing rule has been thoroughly tested as limiting the number of players who can give feedback is designed to reduce play time and the Say One Thing rule may do this enough on its own.

What do you think? Does limiting feedback add more complexity to the game than it’s worth?